Sunday, November 18, 2018

Rejoice in the Lord... always?

In today’s second
lesson we hear Paul admonishing the Philippians to "Rejoice in the Lord always."

It’s easy to rejoice
when you get that job promotion. Or you pass your final exam. Or you find out
that lump that was biopsied isn’t cancer. Yes, rejoice!

But what happens when
you lose your job? Or you fail you exam? Or you find out that the lump is cancer?
Rejoice in the Lord, always? Seriously?

Is this just some Pollyanna
advice that encourages us to bury our head in the sand and ignore reality when our
lives are ready to be flushed down the toilet? Or does it mean that we have
good reason to rejoice in the Lord, even when it looks like our lives are ready
to be flushed down the toilet?

Thanksgiving has
always been my favorite holiday. For several reasons. First of all, there’s the
opportunity to be with people I care about. And then, there’s the food. I love
the turkey and the stuffing and the gravy.

But the older I get,
the more uncomfortable I feel when I sit down to a huge feast surrounded with
people I love. Although, it’s easy to give thanks for blessings like that, I’m
increasingly aware of the fact that life isn’t all about me. And it’s hard for
me not to think about people who aren’t
sitting down to a huge feast surrounded with people they love. Where is the
blessing for them?

I came across a
Thanksgiving message from another Lutheran pastor that listed some of the
reasons we may have to be thankful. It goes like this…

·If you woke up this morning
with more health than illness, you are more blessed than the million who will
not survive the week.

·If you have never
experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the

·agony of torture or the
pangs of starvation, you are ahead of 500 million people around the world.

·If you have food in your
refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof over your head and a place to sleep,
you are richer than 75% of this world.

·If you have money in the
bank, in your wallet, and spare change in a dish someplace, you are among the
top 8% of the world’s wealthy.

And the list goes on…

Is this the way God blesses us, by giving us
stuff that other people don’t have? Do we thank God because we don’t have to live
the wretched lives some people do? That sort of list doesn’t make it for me.
God isn’t just my God. God doesn’t exist to give me all the stuff I want at the
expense of others. How can I give thanks that I’ve been spared when others
suffer?

In the play, Angels
in America, Prior, a character living with AIDS, tells a story on his
sickbed about one of his ancestors, a ship captain who made his living bringing
whale oil to the Old World and immigrants to the New World.

When his ship sank off the coast of Nova Scotia
in a winter storm, Prior’s ancestor, the captain, went down with the ship. But
the crew escaped and took 70 women and children with them in a big, open
rowboat. As the weather got rougher, the crew started to look around at the overcrowded
boat. In an effort to stay afloat, they picked up survivors and tossed them
into the icy sea. The boat was leaking, and as it sank lower, more people were
sacrificed. By the time the crew arrived in Halifax, only nine people remained
on board.

As Prior tells the story, he’s a throwaway
person suffering from AIDS and, of course, he identifies with those being
thrown into the sea.

But, I’m not a throwaway person. And my mind
goes to those nine people who are in the boat and make it to shore. I wonder…
did those nine survivors give thanks to God for delivering them?

Sometimes, when I look at the way I live as a
middle-class American, and I consider the way other people live, I feel a lot
like the nine men who made it to shore in that boat. And that’s nothing for me
to celebrate.

And yet, the story from Angels in America reminds me that I do have reason to rejoice in
the Lord always because it brings to mind another story that I heard.

It’s about a man named Michael Plant, who set
off on a solo crossing of the Atlantic in 1992. He was an expert yachtsman and
had made the trip several times before. His brand-new sailboat, TheCoyote,
was very high tech; there were few like it in the world.

Plant’s support team monitored his trip by
satellite and radio. Everything was smooth sailing. Even when a storm disrupted
the communications, no one worried about it. After all, this guy was one of the
best sailors in the world. His boat was equipped with state-of-the-art
navigational equipment. They figured Plant would resume radio contact when
everything settled down.

When they didn’t hear from him, they tried
repeatedly to reach him by radio. Still nothing. So they sent out Coast Guard
helicopters to search for him.

They found TheCoyote floating upside down. Its
captain and sole passenger was never found.

People wondered how this could have happened.
Everyone knows that sailboats are very hard to turn over. Their deep keels and
massive rudders right themselves. But as the boat was examined, the cause of
the tragedy became clear.

For all its beauty and technological advances, The Coyote didn’t have enough weight
beneath the surface to outweigh the fancy gadgetry above. And so, it flipped
over as it lost its ability to balance in the water.

The more fancy stuff we have in our lives and
the better they look on the surface, the more we believe we’ve been blessed.
But God’s blessing is found beneath the surface. The relationship we have with
God is what blesses us.

We’d do well in our lives to work at developing
that so more weight is given to our lives below the surface and less above the
surface. For when we find ourselves in a time when we’re struggling to stay
afloat in a storm, it will become apparent to us how blessed we are. We’ll
understand that being blessed is not about having everything go our way, but
being blessed is experiencing and knowing that no matter what happens in this
life, God will see us through it.

Our blessings are not measured by the piles of
food we display on our tables, or by the number of friends who surround us for
the feasting. Our blessings are measured by the depth and
weight of the relationship we have with God.

There’s an old Celtic fisherman’s prayer that
says: “Dear God, be good to me; the sea is so wide and my boat is so small.”
It’s so true. The sea is so wide and our boats are so small. And our boats are
blessed, not because of what they carry inside them or how they look above the
surface, compared to other people’s boats. They’re blessed because of what’s
happening below the surface, the part no one can see. It’s the relationship we
have with our God that blesses us. And so, yes. We can rejoice in the Lord… always.

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About Me

Nancy is an ordained pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. She serves at Ascension Lutheran Church in Towson, Maryland. Nancy grew up in Hamilton, Ohio, and then served time at Bowling Green State University, before moving on to Trinity Seminary in Columbus. Starting out in North Dakota, she then returned to Ohio and served churches there before landing in North Carolina, where she served at two different congregations in Charlotte. She was also on the bishop's staff and earned a PhD from Pitt during her spare time in the area of religion and education. She considers herself an educator who happens to be a pastor and it makes a difference in how she does ministry. She is a divorce survivor, and the mother of two artsy-fartsy children who abandoned her when they became adults. Now she shares a home with Father Guido Sarducci, her tuxedo cat.